Where's Waldo?

Just about everyone we know has spent time searching for Waldo in the comic strips (and we have too!). The photomicrograph above illustrates a wireframe rendition of Waldo that we found hiding on the surface of a microprocessor integrated circuit. Discovering this version of Waldo proved to be much more difficult than the one in the comics. When searching the Sunday comic strip, you have to screen several hundred faces to find the real Waldo hiding, usually in a crowd, behind a building or in a corner. We caught this silicon version of Waldo (that is about 30 microns in size) hiding among caches, buses, and registers while searching through many thousands of square microns of complex circuitry with a high-power optical microscope. Waldo is the first Silicon Creature that we discovered, and this led to an exhaustive search for more creatures and construction of the Silicon Zoo gallery.